12 Days

Midweek Christmas Vespers

Reading:

A reading from the works of Charles Porterfield Krauth, who is commemorated by the Lutheran Church on this Tenth Day of Christmas:

Well might Luther write upon the table at Marburg: “This is My body;” simple words, framed by infinite wisdom so as to resist the violence and all the ingenuity of men. Rationalism in vain essays to remove them with its cunning, its learning, and its philosophy. Fanaticism gnashes its teeth at them in vain. They are an immovable foundation for faith in the Sacramental mystery, and the gates of hell cannot shake the faith of the Church, that our Lord Jesus Christ with the true body and true blood which He gave for our redemption on the Cross, is truly present in the Holy Supper …

If it be granted that the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper is one which is fixed, absolute, and unchanging, then it must be substantial, and not imaginary; not a thing of our minds, but of His wonderful person; not ideal, but true; faith does not make it, but finds it, unto life; unbelief does not unmake it, but, to its own condemnation, fails to discern it. The sacramental presence is fathomless, like the Incarnation; like it, also, it is in the sphere of supernatural reality, to which the natural is as the shadow.

Here ends the reading.

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Merry Christmas, everyone. It’s almost time for me to stop saying that, but not quite yet.

The holidays can be a stressful time. Wonderful, yes, but stressful too. Clergy know this as well as anyone. For families with small children, the end of winter break is often more anticipated than its beginning. And so it is with a grateful heart that we look forward to our Twelfth Night celebration, the last and greatest night of Christmas, that we might give these holidays the sendoff they deserve.

The reason that Christmas is 12 days is quite simple and quite sensible. In days of old, the western Church celebrated the birth of Christ on December 25, for a number of reasons we needn’t go into here. The eastern Church celebrated our Lord’s Nativity, along with several other ways that God reveals Himself through Jesus, on January 6. Rather than argue and debate as to whose tradition was the nobler and better attested, the Church simply embraced both, giving us a nice long 12-day feast.

I’ve read claims that the pre-Christian festival of Yule in the north was 12 days—every culture that knows winter knows a winter feast, after all—and that Christians co-opted that holiday with all its traditions. But just the opposite is true. It was a Christian monarch in Norway, Haakon the Good, who moved up and lengthened the celebration of Yule so that it would coincide with Christmas. His pagan subjects seemed to think this a pretty good idea, regardless of his reasons, and were more than happy to raise their drinking horns a little earlier and a little longer.

But in a broader sense, the greater Christmas season—or perhaps I should say the greater winter festival—carries on not for 12 days but for 40. It goes all the way to Candlemas, marking the 40th day after Christ’s birth, when His holy Mother and foster-father brought Him to the Temple in Jerusalem. Here He was dedicated as His Mother’s firstborn, and proclaimed by the prophets Simeon and Anna to be both the Light to reveal God to the gentiles, and the glory of His people Israel.

Candlemas has been largely forgotten in our culture, though it is making something of a comeback of late. It has managed to hang on vestigially in these United States as Groundhog Day, if you can believe that. Honestly, of all the Candlemas traditions that could’ve been preserved by our forebears, I’ve no idea why they picked a superstition about large burrowing rodents. I suppose by early February they had grown as sick of winter as we do.

My point is this. Christmas is the celebration of God entering our world, not as some invisible Spirit or ambiguous vision, but as a Child, a baby of flesh and blood, skin and bones, just like us—as one of us. And this tangible God, this God of Body and Blood, has never left us. Indeed, His Body has only grown—into the Church, into the community of all humanity reborn through Baptism, made one in Christ, with Jesus our head and the Spirit our soul.

Nothing is more wonderful than Christmas, because at Christmas we know Emmanuel, God-With-Us, God born in the manger to fight our battles and share our bread and die our death. And that meeting of Heaven and earth, of God and Man, carries on long after the guests have left and the presents have been unwrapped and the leftovers have been eaten.

It is still Christmas: not the crazy Christmas of shopping and baking and kids bouncing off the walls, but the warm and humble Christmas of the Creator of all worlds nursing at His Mother’s breast, watched over by His loving earthly father. There will be perils and trials and losses yet to come, but in this moment our Savior is born, the world has turned, and the whole of the cosmos shall never be the same.

12 days. 40 days. 365. Christ is with us through it all.

Thanks be to God. And merry Christmas.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.